


Come Home

by Frangipanidownunder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-01 08:51:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20812403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frangipanidownunder/pseuds/Frangipanidownunder
Summary: "Please come home, I miss you."





	Come Home

He used to say it just to wind her up. She’d be half out the door, jacket over one shoulder when he’d text her or yell it out so his neighbours could hear.

When he was taken, he imagined her whispering it in her sleep. Once, he swore he heard her yell it. Her rage piercing the atmosphere, his sorrow absorbing it where it grew inside him, as cancerous as her disease.

He came back but their balance was out, the levity of their relationship was lost, just like he was. So many nights he wanted to say those same words to her, but in the end, he figured out that it was he who was still absent, and it was he who needed to come home.

Later, with years of being on the run over, they found a house and they tried their hand at living. He carried her over the threshold. He teased her for her cooking. He planted seeds. Shoots broke through the dark earth. She found a job. He started writing. But after all they’d seen, after all they’d uncovered, it was the daily grind of living with him that eventually wore her down.

“Please come home, I miss you.“ He left the same message on her cell, in notes on her windscreen, at the hospital reception, at her motel and then at her new apartment.

One day, she drove to the house, handed him a prescription for his depression and asked him to stop harassing her.

Fuck her. Fuck her and her self-righteous, prickly, standoffishness. Her fucking walls of steel. Her fucking diagnosis. She abandoned their son. She abandoned him. Well, at least she kept to her script.

Funny that it should be the files that brought them back together. The irony that the truth should still be out there, that their son should be the missing link. He was always the missing link and the link that was missed. Desperately so.

Now, green shoots of hope are emerging… when her head gets heavy on his shoulder, when he gets to make her bagels in the morning, when she leaves toiletries in the bathroom and several books on the bedside table. Jackson is out there. He will be fine. She tells him so.

He’s laid new pavers outside, leading up to the front steps. She kept complaining that her heels got scuffed on the gravel or stuck in the wet dirt. She’s coming for dinner. He can’t help himself. He finds a stick of chalk and writes his request on the path.

“Please come home, I miss you.”

She stands in front of it. His heart at her feet. But she’s already holding a suitcase.


End file.
